


An Exercise in Choice

by miranda_wave (miranda_askher)



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Reality, Angst, F/M, Family, Post-Doomsday
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-11
Updated: 2011-06-11
Packaged: 2017-10-20 07:50:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/210451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miranda_askher/pseuds/miranda_wave
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One day (Doomsday), one place (Torchwood), one tiny choice (right or left). Two things that might have come after.</p><p>In all the worlds, nothing's ever quite as clear as either/or.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Exercise in Choice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Annissa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annissa/gifts).



> _None of these stories are true._
> 
>  _Or they all are._

It happens like this: Rose chooses the lever on the left. The Doctor simply has a longer reach. When the Daleks are gone and the Earth is safe, Rose clings to the wall, along the seam between worlds, and weeps for her mother and her oldest friend, lost. The Doctor watches her crumpled face and holds her hand.

They leave, and they fly. They run, months of running and then years of learning not to, starting at a beach in Norway. It rings with laughter when they learn its name: Bad Wolf Bay. The world changes around them and they change the world.

He is nine hundred and sixty-seven years old, finally ginger, when he scatters her ashes on the fields of New Earth. As he walks away from her at last, an immeasurably young and old woman with her mother’s eyes takes his hand: four hearts in the vast vast world.

*

Or maybe it’s like this: Rose chooses the lever on the right. Pete and Mickey create a life for her out of nothing. For months, perhaps years, her dreams are horrific, silent. There is no wolf in Norway.

She saves the world, and saves it again. It’s a reflex, a cover while she studies relativity, particle physics, abstract math, the Void. She finds a genius inside herself, and it burns. On an assignment, she visits Torchwood House, where the queen died. What the werewolf says to her in the basement she never tells. She keeps hunting.

When she is eighty-six and somehow still nineteen, Rose accepts the fact that she will always be hunting. It’s just a reflex while she protects this world, or another.

*

The Doctor sees all that ever was or could yet be, but he always knew time would catch up with her. When he sleeps now, he hears another, ageless Rose hammering on the edges of the universe, trapped. She will never find him. He is still not sure if this is better or worse than having and losing.

In a London flat under a zeppelin-filled sky, Rose wakes slowly. Even after so many years and so many silent dreams, there are tears on her face as the ghostly feel of two hearts beating deep in her belly fades into nothing.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by Neil Gaiman's micro-story ["Raining Blood"](http://www.hereinmyhead.com/neil/slg.html), probably the best piece of short-short fiction I've ever read, and also by Schroedinger's Cat.
> 
> This story is dedicated to my wonderful beta, Annissa!


End file.
